R.
H. S. Crossman
SOCIALISM AND THE COLD WAR
The most important decision we have to take is which
role the Labour Party shall play in the three or four years before
the next election-a Fighting Opposition or the Alternative Govern–
ment? Of course, the roles are not completely exclusive. Both the
"Shadow Cabinet" and the National Executive consist of a mixture
of right-wing administrators, who feel themselves at home as mem–
bers of an alternative Government, and left-wing crusaders, who
want to lead a fighting Opposition. During the three years before
the general election, it was the right-wingers who mainly had their
way in rethinking Socialist policy, in formulating the election pro–
gram
and, most ,important of all, in creating the new image of the
Labour Party in the press, and on radio and television. Under the
personal leadership and with the personal inspiration of Mr. Gait–
skell, the image of a crusading Socialist Opposition was suppressed
and the Labour Party presented itself as a humane, decent and
business-like alternative to the Tories. Since the election the Re–
visionists have argued that the concessions made for the sake of
unity to the traditional Left proved fatally expensive
an~
that the
only way of wooing the modem electorate is to remove the last
traces of "leftism" and present the Labour Party quite uncom–
promisingly as an alternative board of management for the Affluent
Society. These Revisionist demands have provoked an equal and
opposite campaign, insisting that the Labour Party should break
with the Establishment and present itself as a fighting Opposition.
Now there is a real danger that the net result of this conflict will
be
a flabby compromise, irrelevant to the problems with which the
Government, Tory or Labour, will have to cope in the next decade.
How, then, can unity of purpose be re-established? The truth is
that there is no principle by recourse to which the eternal conflict
